The celebration was winding down when the door to the street opened once more. Billie was surprised when Detective Inspector Hank Cooper appeared in front of their booth and offered a good-natured if restrained greeting to the dwindling group.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” Billie said, sliding out from the bench seat. The ale had gone to her head, and that didn’t seem to be a terrible thing for the moment. She’d been thinking over her plans for the night. Would she go home, or try to coax the inspector out for a meal? He’d refused her in the Blue Mountains, but perhaps he wouldn’t now.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay,” Cooper said, and remained standing. Billie frowned. Something in his expression made her excuse herself from the table and go to his side. This wasn’t a social visit, evidently. Perhaps this was about the charred body of Georges Boucher, if they had identified him. She was quietly pleased at Shyla’s timing, not wanting her around when the subject inevitably came up.
Billie and the inspector made their way over to an unoccupiedpool table, and she fished a cool ball out of the recesses of a corner netting. An eight ball. “I could be mistaken, but I got an inkling from Constable Primrose that something might be wrong,” she said in her most restrained voice, holding the black ball and considering its meaning. Cooper did not answer her, which did not help the sense she had that all was not well.
Instead, the inspector reached into his overcoat and removed a piece of paper bearing an image. “This man look familiar?” he asked.
Billie considered Cooper’s guarded expression and his veneer of formality, sighed with frustration at this part of his character, and looked at what was on offer. It was a photograph, or a copy of some sort, and it showed a man in perhaps his forties, or even his thirties, with extremely pale hair. He was wearing a crisp Nazi uniform, his cap at a slight angle, and on it Billie could see the crest of the eagle atop a swastika, and below that, theTotenkopf,the distinctive skull and crossbones worn by Nazi officers. The uniform suited him the way a black hood suited an executioner. The man’s lips were thin and his eyes bright. Across one side of his face were lines of scars, the skin pulled.
Billie contained a shudder. “Yes, that’s him all right. The girls knew him as Franz or Frank.”
“His name is Franz Hessmann,” Cooper said in a low voice, pocketing the image. “He was charged in absentia in Hamburg, in the British zone, and sentenced to death. They say he was quite high up at the Ravensbrück camp.”
Billie felt a chill rise slowly up her spine.The Ravensbrück trials.Ravensbrück was the dedicated women’s camp set up by the Nazis north of Berlin where Jewish and Romany women, and women and girls accused of “prostitution” or poor moral standing, were sentduring the war. She’d heard that thousands of women from occupied nations were also inmates there—Soviets, Dutch and French women, Poles, and many more. Few survived. Often the women arrived with children, most of whom died of starvation along with their mothers, thanks to the gradually decreasing rations. Conditions were said to have been extraordinarily brutal. The female auxiliary SS guards at Ravensbrück, including Irma “the Hyena” Grese, later transferred to Auschwitz and since sentenced to death, and another guard known as the Beast of Ravensbrück, were infamous. The guards literally worked the women inmates to death with slave labor and, from what Billie had heard, had devised strange tortures and power games, perhaps hoping to impress the Third Reich establishment with their commitment to destroying the will of the prisoners in their care. Eventually, as the Final Solution was put in place, gas chambers had been installed to speed up the killing, and when the end of the war neared, the killing had accelerated yet further, the guards not willing to let their prisoners survive to tell what they had witnessed and endured.
Yes, Billie knew of it.
“He wasn’t one of the doctors?” she asked, feeling suddenly as sober as a judge. In addition to the female guards, the place was notorious for the experiments performed on the prisoners—amputations, removing bones and attempting transplants. Cutting the women and infecting the wounds with germs to see what would happen. Introducing dirt and glass into their bodies and refusing to administer pain medication. And when the women succumbed, the Nazis took what was left, of course. Their shoes. Their wedding rings. Their gold fillings. Hessmann had a barrel full to melt down and live off.
Cooper shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. He was a campadministrator. A major in the Waffen-SS and, later, camp commandant.”
The camp commandant.Billie swore under her breath. A Nazi camp commandant, here in Australia? It was almost unbelievable.
“And the airman’s burn? Did he do time with the Luftwaffe? Or was it something else?” she speculated, remembering his reaction to the fire, the extreme fear in a man who had otherwise seemed devoid of emotion. It was as if the fire had triggered something, shocked him psychologically.
Again, Cooper shook his head. “The scarring, you mean? Apparently he earned that in the camp from some prisoners in one of the factories. Saboteurs.”
The Ravensbrück women had been pressed into different types of slave labor, depending on their physical strength and abilities, forced to aid the German war machine against their will. Some worked in textiles, some made parts for Daimler-Benz or electrical components for the Siemens electric company, and some were involved in making Hitler’s V-2 rocket, among other tasks. Some were made to pull a huge roller to pave the streets. Billie had seen a photograph of the roller after liberation. It was a terrifying image—the roller huge and looking like it needed twelve horses to pull it, not human women. There were incredible stories of defiance. Even the women who had been forced to sew, many of them elderly and increasingly frail, used to rig the German soldiers’ socks so they’d get blisters, Billie had heard. A thousand small rebellions in the face of torture and death.
“A group of the women sabotaged some rocket components for the Siemens company and there was an explosion and fire at the factory. Hessmann was there at the time and got out with just the facial burns, I guess.”
Billie thought on that. The bravery of it.
“You do agree it’s him?” she asked. “I don’t think I can be mistaken. He’s quite distinctive-looking with that hair. I mean, you’ve seen him with your own eyes?” Cooper looked down at his shoes, and Billie’s heart leaped into her throat. Her chest felt constricted, as if someone was sitting on it. “Tell me everything is okay, Inspector,” she demanded. “Constable Primrose didn’t tell me anything particular, but I got the feeling... Well, I got the feeling it wasn’t all good news. What is it I’m not being told?”
At this, Cooper took a deep breath and appeared to steel himself, which did nothing for Billie’s gut. “There was something of a... mix-up,” he finally answered. “There was a constable on duty at Richmond and he let Hessmann go.”
Billie’s lips moved to form words, but none came. Stunned, she regarded Cooper silently. She felt the urge to strike him, strike anything, but he was not the one she was angry with.
“Constable Howard says he was faced with a solicitor who was persuasive, and he appears to have panicked and agreed to release Hessmann. He didn’t know all the details, of course, only knew about the claims made by the Aboriginal girls. He said there wasn’t enough to keep him. The sergeant was not there. It never would have happened on his watch. He...” The inspector trailed off, seeing her expression.
Theclaimsof the girls.Claims.
Billie brought a hand to her face, and she pulled it down slowly over her eyes, her nose, and stopped it over her mouth. The floor seemed to be moving beneath her feet. “This isn’t some kind of... joke?” she managed.
Cooper shook his head.
“So, we had a commandant from goddamn Ravensbrück, wanted for war crimes and now imprisoning and abusing girls here in Australia, on our watch, and he’s gone? And we have witnesses as to what he was doing here, and he was let go? We have Adin and the girls and their testimony...” She shuddered, thinking of how Shyla and the girls would feel when they found out a police officer had willingly let the man go, knowing they were prepared to testify. What a betrayal. What an utter betrayal by a system Shyla herself had said they didn’t trust because they’d been let down before. And Adin would have been able to identify him. Adin had agreed to testify.
“We have witnesses, Inspector. We have that horrific book of dates and names. We have the surviving oil drums in that shed.” A couple of people at the billiards tables looked in her direction, and a game on the other side of the room stopped. She seemed to be speaking more loudly than she’d realized.
“Yes, I believe we have identified him,” the inspector said carefully, “and we are still sorting through what survived the fire. I’m trying to convince my superiors—”
“Your superiors aren’t convinced?” She slammed her fist down on the billiards table and it stung where the skin had been grazed and torn.
Cooper didn’t answer. Billie wondered where Hessmann was now. Where would he go? Did he have enough connections to stay on the run? For how long? Could he leave the country unnoticed?
